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Central Park Rumba is an internationally
known music event. I first heard
about it in Mexico City in 1980, described in
great detail by Cesar Sandoval, a drummer
who had lived in New York and frequented
the rumba circle in the 1970s. In San Diego,
Central Park (CP) Rumba had been the rehearsal
context for some of the Puerto Rican
musicians I knew from the late 1980s Latin
jazz scene. When traveling to Havana to
visit my family in the 1990s, rumberos (rumba
drummers) and other musicians asked me
if I knew their rumba friends from Union City, the Bronx, and Central Park. I arrived
at my first CP Rumba the second week of
September 1994, my first week living in the
city. There in Central Park, I was told that
rumba was addictive. I got hooked! I became
a regular to the scene.

Traditional rumba, what is known as el
complejo de la rumba (the rumba genre), has
taught me to understand how performance,
music and dance, sound, and gesture function
as reservoirs of memory—they transmit
history, its future and possible contestation.
I am particularly interested in embodiment as a source of knowledge, and rumba articulates
a repertoire of material, historical, and
discursive knowledge through the embodiment
of gestures, movement, and sound.
Rumba has also taught me that while performance
is ephemeral, embodiment is not.

Unison: rumba chorus. All photos: Berta Jottar

CP: The Rumba Scene

When the temperature reaches 65 degrees
on a Sunday afternoon, the southwest
corner of Central Park’s rowboat lake
becomes the destination of New York’s
rumberos. However, the “official” rumba season starts on the second Sunday in May,
the day of the Cuban Parade, or parada as
it’s called within the New York Latino/a
community. Rumba is an African-based
music and dance form of Cuba. Since the
1960s, rumberos have gathered at the lake,
originally at Bethesda Fountain and more
recently at the benches west of the much-photographed
Bow Bridge, where they can
view the reflected towers of the Dakota, San
Remo, and El Dorado buildings, housing
New York’s rich and famous. Underneath
the shading branches of ancient willow
trees, the rumba’s pulsating rhythms echo
the soundscape of New York City’s Afro-
Latin diaspora: Puerto Ricans, Cubans,
Dominicans, Colombians, Panamanians,
and every other ethnicity’s drum-playing
aficionados gather here. For well over a
century, this idyllic park has provided an
egalitarian environment, offering tourists
from around the world and New Yorkers
of diverse classes and ethnicities the opportunity
to share cultural experiences. Part
of Central Park’s rich and inclusive history,
the Central Park Rumba also serves as a
roadmap for understanding the internal
negotiations constituting New York City’s
rumba community from the 1960s through
the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Rumba music can be performed using
any surface or material: a plastic container,
a wood box, or a bench all serve the purpose.
This inventiveness and dexterity is
part of the long history of the African
diaspora’s struggle to maintain its traditional
languages, religions, and instruments,
with ingenious materials replacing the
often forbidden drums. On a good day,
however, Central Park rumberos bring the
entire family of traditional instrumentation:
three tumbadora drums commonly
known as congas (the tumbador bass drum,
the 3/2 drum, and the quinto drum), the
clave (two wooden sticks that maintain
the rhythmic base), and the catá or guagua
(two long wooden sticks that are struck
against a wood surface to keep the tempo
going). Unlike in Cuba, men dominate the
rumba scene in the park—unless Beatriz,
a strong, tall Boricua grabs the tumbador, her favorite drum. But when the afternoon
is at its most musical, Cuban women take
center stage by dancing the guaguancó with
Tito, El Tao, Humberto, or Hugo.

The Central Park Rumba is above all a
community’s family gathering, with hours
of socializing, eating, and making new connections
on the grassy area uphill from the
benches, where a variety of pan-Caribbean
drinks and foods are shared and vended.
The benches where drummers sit become
a stage, and the incline of the grassy area
produces a natural amphitheater where
those who are socializing can hear the
sound of the drums and singers perfectly.
The area’s acoustics have been analyzed by
seasoned singers like Manuel “El Llanero”
Martínez Olivera, who have dealt with the
inconveniences of singing in an open and
humid space: “As a singer, one has to project
the voice towards the grass; otherwise,
if sent to the opposite direction, the voice
gets lost through the lake” (1996).

As soon as a dominant singer like El
Llanero, Alfredo “Pescao” Díaz, René Rosales,
or Abe Rodríguez arrives at the circle,
a call-and-response interaction begins
between the singer and the spontaneous
chorus made up of anybody interested in
participating. As the rumba crescendos,
people who are congregated in the area
walk more quickly toward the circle, incorporating
themselves into the rumba. The
rumba is on! ¡Se formó la rumba, caballero!

Rumba is a social event set to polyrhythmic
music played on percussive instruments;
it is a cultural practice constituted
via the embodiment of sound, music,
movement, and gesture within a call-and-response structure. It evolved in the
nineteenth-century ports of Havana and
Matanzas, during lunchtime gatherings of
stevedores and sugarcane workers. They
entertained themselves by playing their respective traditional rhythms on sonorous
boxes—often made from the wood of
catfish or candle boxes—using two spoons
for the clave. Rumba is a manifestation
of transculturation, what Fernando Ortíz
identified as the dialectic process of cultural
give-and-take that two or more ethnic
groups experience in their forced or willing
encounter once deterritorialized—outside
their native lands. Ortíz’s theory of transculturation
acknowledges the colonized
population’s capacity for creative response.
Rather than passively accepting materials
from the dominant society (assimilation),
they have the potential to transform these
new elements into their own (Ortíz 1963).
Rumba is the creation of a new form, a
synthesis of the ethnic encounter among the Yoruba (Nigeria), Bantú (Congo), and
Carabalí (Nigeria and Southern Cameroon)
created in the slave system of Spanish colonialism.
According to Alejo Carpentier,
rumba was the first modern musical form
of the Cuban nation (1993).

The rumba genre has three variants:
the rumba yambú, the guaguancó, and the
columbia. The yambú, the oldest and most
cadenced form, is a couple’s dance of mimetic
moves. The female dancer is the center
of attention, and it is mostly performed
in theatrical contexts. The guaguancó is a
dynamic and erotic couple’s dance based
on playful competition between the two
dancers. Its main characteristic, the vacunao
(vaccination), is a pelvic thrust performed by
the male dancer toward the female indicating
sexual possession. The columbia is the
rumba from the countryside of Union de
Reyes. Although there are testimonies about
the existence of women dancers, like Andrea
Baro (Orovio 1994), its contemporary performance
is predominantly male. Dexterity
and competition between the soloist dancers
are its central characteristics; dancers must
demonstrate total corporeal control.

The rumba community has established
rules and protocols across time that govern
rumba’s music, sound, gestures, dance,
and song. Above all, the clave reigns. It is
the fixed pulse of the music that defines
the correctness of the genre. As Alexis
Aragón explained, “I am the prisoner of
clave, I cannot do anything outside of it”
(2000). The clave’s rhythm is the music’s
spinal cord—what holds together the entire
ensemble. Every sound, gesture, and song
must be in the proper musical relationship
to the clave. Essentially, understanding the
clave is what constitutes a rumbero/a and
sets these musicians apart from those who
sing on the “wrong side of clave” or dance
and play music outside of it.

To be a rumbero/a is to be a part of
and participant in an acoustic community,
with its own secular, religious, and spiritual
understanding of sound and gesture.
Halting or interrupting the rumba by
suddenly leaving a drum or not finishing
a song is particularly disrespectful. Not
all rumbero/a are active practitioners of
Afro-Cuban religions, but those whose
skills are respected understand the multiple
layers of ancient traditions that must be
acknowledged within the rumba’s circle.
The rumba can be performed on any
surface, but the sound of the drum must
be respected for its historic religious and
spiritual significance. Here are some voices
from Central Park Rumba:

You enter CP, and it’s as if you have just
entered Afro-descendant territory. The
drums define the entrance. It’s as if you
are entering Elegua’s space. You have
permission to enter, and the drums are
welcoming you. . . . Our drums are part
of us. We speak through our drums, and
they speak through us. We are Africa, in
all its entirety. (Brown 2009)

Via the sound of the drum, I put myself
in touch with my ancestors—and that
is a recognition of myself, my identity,
what I am, and where I come from.
(Santana 2009)

When you play the drum, you’re invoking
all those beings who gave us the
culture that we have today, and a good
rumba cleanses the soul, the heart, and
the spirit. (Guerra 2009)

The drum was the first creation of a
vehicle to express yourself outside of
your body: it represents the heartbeat.
. . . The drum has taken me so many
places; I’ve made money from it, I’ve
met people. It’s like a spaceship. (Flores
Valentin de Hostos 2001)

The power of the drum—its power of
convocation—reverberates across a history
of prohibition. Its sound is a call that gathers
the masses for religious, cultural, and at
times rebellious purposes. In the nineteenthcentury
United States, drumming became
the sound of revolt, prohibited by slave
laws called the Black Codes. Decades later,
Prohibition-era legislation forbade the use
of drum sets and other jazz instruments, and
in the mid-1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s
“quality of life” campaign attempted to
eradicate the public use of Afro-descendant
drums using unreasonable noise and disorderly
conduct statutes.

The Politics of Sound

Within the rumba circle, the foundation
of the rumbero’s acoustic and kinesthetic
interactions is based in part on religious
affiliations, because Afro-Cuban religious
traditions are embedded in rumba’s traditional
musical form. Less experienced
or culturally disconnected drummers are
often unaware of these subtleties and
overtly or covertly disrespected for their
ignorance. In more sophisticated rumba
circles, however, the rhythms or songs
of the various Afro-Cuban religions
coexist, but cannot be mixed. Alfredo
Díaz explained, “No se pueden mezclar los
tratados, y los conceptos religiosos de lo que
significa cada cosa, cada religion, cada espacio.
Son los patrones que se convierten en protocolos”
(2011). [The different religious concepts
and treaties cannot be mixed, what each
thing means, each religion, each space.
These are the patterns that transform into
the protocols.]

Because the meaning of sound is
diverse, the understanding of sound
becomes a type of cultural politic. For
instance, the relationship of the Abakuá
society (a religious brotherhood of
Carabalí origin) toward sound differs
from that of the Yoruba Regla de Osha
practice or the Palo traditions from the
Congo. Within these three religions, the
sound of the drum is sacred, but each
religious group has its own rhythms, and
the religious connotations and functions
of sound and gender-specific activity
differ for each group. Sound has specific
functions within the consecrations and
religious ceremonies. If for the Abakuá,
the sound of the ékue drum is the voice of
God, for the followers of Palo Monte, the
sound of the guataca (spade) is what calls
the spirits of the ancestors. The diverse
significance, meaning, and attributes of
these sounds are revealed but rarely discussed
within the rumba’s circle, which is
essentially secular.

Rumba’s Coded Gestures

Because rumba is the secular synthesis
of different African religious traditions’
rhythms and movements, the significance of
its performance is highly coded. Although
rumba is a secular practice, there are particular
gestures that serve as religious and
secular signs of approval among the rumba
participants. The touching of a performer’s
forehead with the tip of one’s fingers means
bendición (blessing you and your art), as well
as artistic approval. Gestures also function at
the kinesthetic and sonorous register. Singers
and musicians enter the rumba circle by
using their index finger to ask permission of
those executing the music or song. A singer
cannot enter the musical conversation until
the performing singer has completed his or
her theme. In the same way, the percussionist
must ask for the drum to be able to enter
the musical conversation.

Asking for permission to enter the
rumba circle in any of its manifestations
(music, song, dance) assumes that
the individual has the skills to sustain
the ongoing conversation. Thus, artistic
competition—demonstrating lyrical and
physical dexterity—is a central element
among performers. But competition also
assumes another layer of signification,
that of the puya: an indirect gesture saying,
“I am better than you.” The puya
assumes an attitude of artistic superiority.
When the puya between individuals is the
result of preexisting conflict, it becomes
a provocation.

Silent protest by Leon Felipe during the Giuliani administration.

The significance of gesture is central to
rumba’s dance. For instance, the rumba
guaguancó, a fertility dance performed by
a couple, mimics the gestures of a rooster
following a hen. The male cannot touch
the female, but he performs the vacunao
in an evident or hidden fashion. The
vacunao becomes a sign of competition
and seduction, trickiness, and playfulness.
Dancing, the female must protect herself by covering her parts with her hands or a handkerchief. The “winning” dancer, male
or female, continues dancing with the next
competitor.

The symbolism of gesture functions only
by following the protocols. Musicians, dancers,
and singers should not randomly mix the
different rumba styles or African traditions
embedded within the rumba. For instance,
the columbia dancer should not include the
gestures of the all-male Abakuá religious society
of the Carabalí. Although the columbia
and the Abakuá are two male practices, it is
a mistake to combine or confuse the two as
part of the columbia tradition, which is of
Congolese origin.

Rumba’s Routes

New York City is the second home of
rumba, in both its traditional and commercial
manifestations. In the 1920s, rumba
de salon (known as rhumba) became an international
phenomenon in the Havana,
New York, and Paris cabaret circuits. These
glamorous cabarets entertained patrons
with traditional conjuntos, performing son or
guaracha music. These so-called rhumbas
were sanitized arrangements of traditional
rumba lyrics (for example, “Maria de la
O”), rumba choreographies, and rumba
uniforms. The popularity of these conjuntos
eventually led to the “rhumba craze”—the
Afro-Cubanismo aesthetic movement
(Moore 1997).

By 1950, prestigious rumberos had arrived
in New York as part of the musical
cross-fertilization between the U.S., Puerto
Rico, and Cuba. The legendary Rodríguez
brothers, Arsenio, Enrique, and Raul;
Cándido Camero; Luciano “Chano” Pozo;
Carlos “Patato” Valdes; Ramón “Mongo”
Santamaría; Eugenio “Totíco” Arango;
Armando Peraza; Francisco Aguabella; and
Julito Collazo figure as central contributors
to the U.S. professional jazz scene. Many
of these rumberos—Collazo, in particular—
participated in building New York’s
Afro-Cuban religious community. It was
in the private homes where Santería and
Palo Monte ceremonies took place that
traditional rumba flourished.

During the 1950s, traditional rumba
knowledge spread in New York through the
recordings of these rumberos and the public
rumbas spontaneously breaking out in the
parks and on the street corners and beaches
of East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—
the barrios the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and
African American communities shared. By
the 1960s, Paula Ballán, Felix Sanabria, and
Bobby Sanabria remember a “drum fever”
articulating a cultural pride that was part of
the civil rights and black power movements.
Central Park was not exempt; it had become
a central location where first-generation
Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans born in New
York), Dominican Yorks (Dominicans born
in New York), and other Afro-descendants
met at the rhythm of the drum.

1960s and ’70s: CP Rumba
and the Return to Roots

In the early 1960s, Central Park was one
of the most effervescent musical contexts
in New York City, and the performance of
rumba music in the park brought together
a generation of young African Americans,
Jews, and Nuyoricans born in the 1950s. Although
the park’s surrounding barrios had
their own Afrocentric drumming circles,
Central Park created a social space in which
young people from different racial, ethnic,
class, and religious backgrounds freely
congregated and showed off their musical
skills. Paula Ballán remembers the scene:

On Sunday, CP became a different
place; from the band shell, to the fountain,
to the lake, the park had a totally
racially mixed crowd. In the Hispanic
community, people worked six days a
week, so Sunday was truly unique with
their presence. CP was also a perfect
example of a New York–style anarchy
at its best—the most artistic and
free—love, music, movement. It was
a kind of stage for rebelliousness for
people to be out there....The rumba
represented a perfect place where you
could interact racially in an acceptable
environment. It was a demilitarized
zone for a whole generation that was
part of the civil rights movement, but
needed places where we could interact
without being under the scrutiny of the
family we came from....CP belonged
to the people of New York, and on
Sunday the owners came to check out
their property. (2011)

For many Nuyoricans, the tumbadora
drum had a significant role in the formulation
of their identity. Central Park was a
place touched by the civil rights movement,
the demonstrations against the Vietnam
War, and an era of Puerto Rican ethnic
pride typified by both the rise of the Young
Lords and the Puerto Rican independence
movement. Nuyoricans brought their transistor
radios to Central Park, synchronized
to Felipe Luciano’s radio show Latin Roots,
broadcasting salsa tunes critical of Puerto
Rico’s colonial status. Indeed, Luciano’s
project mirrored his generation’s growth
of critical and colonial consciousness,
while reclaiming African contributions to
Puerto Rican culture. Drumming was the
galvanizing event for young Nuyoricans
and African Americans, as Elio Luis Flores
Valentin de Hostos told me in 1999:

In the ’70s, there was a cultural revolution
in this country. Everyone was going
back to their roots, and playing drums
in the street and the park was part of
that expression, to express your roots
and be proud of them. There was a time
in our community when you couldn’t
express any kind of black influence
because people would discriminate
against you. People didn’t want to be
discriminated against and were ashamed
of their country music, because they
didn’t want to be labeled as ignorant
country hicks.

Indeed, the erasure of Puerto Rico’s
African presence was part of a larger and
complicated history of Spanish and United
States colonialism. Although the recordings
of Cortijo y su Combo had been central
in the development of Puerto Rican pride
and race consciousness, these were not
traditional bomba and plena recordings; the
recordings of traditional Afro–Puerto Rican
music were just unavailable. The availability
of rumba recordings produced in
Havana and New York by Cuban rumberos,
however, allowed these young Nuyoricans
to engage in their own search and experimentation
with their African roots. This
generation studied the available recordings,
including Alberto Zaya’s Guaguancó
Afro-Cubano (1955), and Mongo Santamaría’s
Tambores y Cantos (1955) and Yambú:
Mongo Santamaría y Sus Ritmos Afro Cubanos
(1958). Santamaría’s records were the first
to explain the different rhythms and their
history and significance. Moreover, the
isolation of the rhythm sections in some
of these recordings provided both “models
for learning their execution . . . [and] an impetus
to their dissemination” (López 1976,
106–8). But two New York City productions
became seminal to this generation’s
acquisition of rumba knowledge: Mongo
Santamaría’s Afro Roots (1958) and Patato y
Totíco (1968). According to Felix Sanabria,
both became “national hymns” for this
Nuyorican generation, which continued the
tradition of improving their rumba skills in
their homes and in Central Park (1998). For
Nuyoricans, rumba’s familiar antecedents
served as a source to express their identification
with Africa; the performance of
rumba as roots became their articulation
of an Afro-Boricua identity (Jottar 2011).

By the late 1970s, the rumba scene
migrated to its present location in Central
Park, near Bow Bridge. Some of the musicians
who gathered there had already established
their own rumba ensembles. The
Rumberos All Stars rehearsed at Central
Park what made them popular, their rumba
breaks (cierres), inspired by the record Papín
y Sus Rumberos (1954). Felix Sanabria, Eddie
Bobé, Eddy and Abe Rodríguez, Alberto
Serrano, Kenneth Burney, Morty and Mark
Sanders, Paula Ballán, and Jesús “Tito” Sandoval
were among the core rumba group
in Central Park. They cultivated the form
and embraced a decisive wave of rumberos
arriving in the city, the Marielitos.

1980s: The Mariel Rule

The 1980 arrival of the Mariel boatlift
to the U.S. had a tremendous repercussion
in CP Rumba’s sound and racial politics.
The boatlift brought 125,000 Cuban exiles to U.S. territory. As a type of punishment
against the U.S. economic and cultural
embargo, Fidel Castro permitted a mass
departure of inmates from jails and mental
institutions and a large number of political
dissidents and gays. Unlike their Cuban
counterparts in Miami, the Marielitos were
black, working class (Portes and Stepick
1993), and included a substantial number
of rumberos, Abakuáses, Santeros, and
Paleros. If the United States’ economic
embargo against Cuba had severed the musical
exchange between the two countries,
the Marielitos’ arrival in the New York
metropolitan area revitalized the practice of
Afro-Cuban religious and musical traditions,
marking a new era in Central Park’s rumba
sound and protocols.

The Mariel brought rumberos to New
York who already had a name in Havana,
including Tao La Onda, Enrique “Kiki”
Chavalonga, Daniel Ponce, Xíomara Rodríguez,
Roberto Bolaños, and Alberto
Morgan. But two Marielitos transformed
the rumba and Santería scene in New York:
Orlando “Puntilla” Rios and Manuel “El
Llanero” Martínez Olivera. Puntilla transformed
the existing Regla de Osha community
by teaching his deep knowledge of the
sacred batá drums.

Hugo Torres dancing the rumba columbia.

The young generation of
Nuyoricans and African Americans—Eddy
Rodríguez, Kenneth Burney, Abe Rodríguez,
Felix Sanabria, and others—became
his direct disciples and collaborators. El
Llanero had a tremendous impact in Central
Park.He introduced the idea of un rumbero
completo, a complete rumbero who dominates
the entire genre; he could sing, play the
drum, and dance. He established the rule of
clave and a new repertoire of songs combining
Spanish, Yoruba, and Kikongo lyrics.
More importantly, he opened the space for
female singers, like Paula Ballán and others,
who began to participate in the rumba circle.
Kiki introduced dance back into the scene
with highly acrobatic and dangerous choreographies.
The fertile collaboration between
El Llanero, Paula Ballán, Felix Sanabria, Abe
Rodriguez, Juan “Bamboo” Vega, Roberto
Borrel, Juan “Curba” Dreke, and Enrique
Dreke launched two folkloric ensembles in
the early 1980s: Chevere Macún Chevere
(1980) and Los Afortunados (1985).

The Marielitos’ African ancestry challenged
the popular belief that Cubans
were mostly white, upper-middle class, and
antirevolutionary—a conservative discourse
promoted by Miami Cubans whose identity
relies on their condition as exiled victims
of the Communist regime. Being black,
many rumberos of the Mariel generation
acknowledge the Cuban Revolution’s
egalitarian project of racial inclusion, which
included eradicating the rampant illiteracy
among Cuba’s poor (and mostly black)
population that Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship
had promoted. The Revolution also
institutionalized Afro-Cuban folklore with
the 1962 founding of the influential dance
ensemble Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de
Cuba, which celebrates the contributions
of Afro-Cuban culture to the nation. With
the arrival of the Mariel in Central Park, “la
rumba no era como ayer” [the rumba was no
longer like yesterday’s].

1990s: One Rumba,
Two Exoduses

While CP Rumba had been the locus of
Nuyorican experimentation and identity
formation during the 1960s and ’70s, by
the 1990s, CP Rumba had been claimed by
Cuban rumberos, not only from the Mariel,
but also from the 1994 balsero (raft people)
immigration. The balseros, the second
largest wave of Cuban immigrants to reach
the United States, shifted the sound and
spiritual interactions of CP Rumba. The
balsero exodus brought a young generation
of Afro-Cuban rumberos who had grown
up under the revolutionary regime, including
many from the Abakuá revival movement
of the 1990s. Under the Revolution’s
atheist regime, the Marielitos experienced
marginalization of Afro-Cuban religious
practices, but with the economic depression
of the 1990s Cuban Special Period,
the government promoted Afro-Cuban
culture—including officially sanctioned performances
of rumba, Santería, Palo Monte,
and Abakuá folklore—as a central part of a
new tourist economy.

By the late 1990s, CP Rumba had become
the site where Abakuás from both migrations
recognized each other through their
coded gestures and rhythms. Within the
rumba circle, balseros like Hugo Torres
would spontaneously introduce the gestures
of the Abakuá iremes, masquerade figures
representative of the ancestors. Only those
initiated into the religion would understand
the layered significance of his choreography,
replying with particular Abakuá rhythmic
patterns and in their Carabalí ritual language.
With the balseros, the rumba circle became
a space of Abakuá sociality, making evident
a series of historical genealogies articulated
in sound and movement.

During the second half of the 1990s,
the CP Rumba also experienced a series of challenges as part of New York City’s
ongoing process of privatization under the
Giuliani administration. Under his zero tolerance
initiative, CP rumberos were caught
between the rubrics of “visual disorder” and
“unreasonable noise.” The re-Cubanization
of CP Rumba by the Mariel and balsero
generations coincided with the city’s establishment
of the Central Park Conservancy
and its effort to re-white Central Park. “Zero
tolerance was the only way to regain control
of this unmanageable anarchy by rebuilding
the park and putting people back where they
belong,” Paula Ballán observed with dismay
(2011). Indeed, the Giuliani administration
dissolved the rumba scene for two consecutive
years. Beginning in 1995, rumberos
were fined, and their drums were constantly
confiscated under unreasonable noise and
disorderly conduct ordinances.

By the year 2000, the zero tolerance regime
had galvanized the rumba community.
United in their struggle against the police
presence in their rumba, some rumberos
allowed the police to arrest them; others
created walking rumbas to exit the park.
Although the rumba community could not
keep up with the drum confiscations, it never
gave up its established location. For two
consecutive years, people stopped bringing
their drums to Central Park but continued
their rumbas a capella or used plastic containers
and coolers as their drums. Others
created photo and painting exhibits in
the same area where the musicians had
gathered. Boom boxes substituted for the
tumbadora drums, amplifying the newest
rumba records. The rumba continued as
a cultural celebration without the actual
drums. As Humberto Brown stated, “Even
if the police physically take our drums away,
our bodies are our percussion. We reproduce
rumba with or without the official
drum. We have proven after five hundred
years that it does not matter how much they
repress the drums, the drums always resist,
always survive, and will always be. We are
like our drums” (2001).

Under the zero tolerance campaign,
people no longer identified by their country
of origin; when the police arrived, people unified and identified as Afro-Latinos. But
like magic, on the first summer Sunday
under the Bloomberg administration, the
rumberos returned with their drums to
Central Park. Although Central Park continues
its restoration process, fencing the
rumba community out of its traditional
location, the rumba is heard every summer
at the benches located between Bow Bridge
and Cherry Hill. Now a new generation of
Afro-Latinas are entering the rumba circle
as singers and dancers, challenging the
Park’s dominant male presence. The rumba
continues in New York City.

Berta Jottar is an
independent artist-scholar. She began
to document rumba music in New York
in 1994, earning her PhD in 2005 from
New York University’s Department of
Performance Studies. She produced a
rumba recording, Rumbos de la Rumba/
The Routes of Rumba (2008), with Pedro
Martínez and Román Díaz, created a
video installation in 2009 about Central
Park Rumba under the Giuliani administration,
and is currently producing
a documentary about the history of
Central Park Rumba. Berta thanks Paula
Ballán for her editorial advice.

López, René. 1976. Drumming in the New
York Puerto Rican Community: A Personal
Account. In Black People and Their Culture: Selected
Writings from the African Diaspora, 106–9.
Ed. Bernice Reagon, Rosie L. Hooks, and
Linn Shapiro. Washington, DC: Festival of
American Folklife.

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